Masai Russell Breaks the 100m Hurdles World Record in Zurich
12.09 seconds — three hundredths faster than Tobi Amusan's mark from the 2022 World Championships, on the same night dos Santos broke the men's 400m hurdles record.
By Miles Ashworth · 27 Aug 2026 · 3 min read · Australia edition
Masai Russell, Team USA, 2024. Photo: Habst, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).American hurdler Masai Russell ran 12.09 seconds in the women's 100m hurdles at Weltklasse Zürich on Thursday 27 August, breaking the world record at the Letzigrund. It was a world record, a Diamond League record and a meeting record in one run, and it took three hundredths of a second off a mark that had stood for four years.
The record she took down belonged to Nigeria's Tobi Amusan, who ran 12.12 in her semi-final at the 2022 World Championships in Eugene. Amusan was in the Zurich final as well and finished second in 12.23. Nadine Visser of the Netherlands was third in a season's best 12.34. Ditaji Kambundji, the reigning world champion, was also in the field. That was the quality Russell beat, and she beat it clearly.
How the race went
There was nothing lucky about it. Russell got a strong start, was in control by the third hurdle and ran away from a world-class field from there. It was her 11th consecutive win in the event this season.
She said afterwards that she barely remembered the race itself. "I just knew that the start felt really good, and then by the time I looked up, I was crossing the line," she said. When she saw the clock she knew straight away. "I dreamed about this moment, and then hearing the crowd, like, this is the best place I could have ever imagined to break the world record."
A season building to it
Zurich was the peak of a season that had been heading this way for months. Russell had already run 12.14 at the Diamond League meeting in China and 12.20 in Monaco on 10 July, both times that would have won almost any race in history. The only question going into Zurich was whether everything would come together on the same night. It did.
It is a big turn from 2025. Russell came into last year's World Championships in Tokyo as the Olympic champion and finished fourth, while Kambundji took the title. She had won the US title that summer in 12.22, but a fourth place at a global championship is the kind of result that makes an athlete rethink things. Whatever changed over the winter, 2026 has been a different story.
Who Masai Russell is
Russell was born in Washington, D.C. in June 2000 and ran for the University of Kentucky from 2021 to 2023. There she set a collegiate record of 7.75 in the 60m hurdles and an NCAA record of 12.36 in the 100m hurdles, both in 2023, before turning professional that June.
A year later she was Olympic champion. In Paris she won gold in 12.33, beating France's Cyréna Samba-Mayela in one of the closest finishes of the Games. She is still only 26, and she now holds the Olympic title and the world record at the same time.
How the record has moved
The women's 100m hurdles record is unusually hard to move. Bulgaria's Yordanka Donkova ran 12.21 in 1988, and that mark stood for 28 years until Kendra Harrison ran 12.20 in London in 2016. Amusan's 12.12 in Eugene came six years later and was a huge jump by the standards of the event. Russell has now taken another three hundredths off it.
A two-record night
Zurich had already seen one world record before Russell got to her blocks. Less than 40 minutes earlier, Brazil's Alison dos Santos ran 45.80 in the men's 400m hurdles to break Karsten Warholm's record from the Tokyo Olympics, with Warholm finishing second in the same race. Two hurdles world records on one night, in front of one crowd, is about as rare as athletics gets.
